The team behind close friend photo-sharing app Retro has developed a side project called Splat that turns your photos into AI coloring pages for kids. Start with a new shot or something from your camera roll, choose a visual style, then create a clear line drawing page that your child can color on screen or print out.
Parents can already find endless printable pages online, but the search is often the annoying part. Many sites are ad-heavy, overloaded, or charge small fees when you just want a quick hand for a bored child.
Splat’s workflow is based on quick decisions. Select a photo, choose a style like anime, manga, cartoon, comic, or a 3D movie look, and the app will convert it into an outline of a coloring sheet.
If you don’t have the right image on hand, Splat also offers its own kid-friendly categories, including Animals, Space, Flowers, Fairy Tales, Robots, and Cars. In short tests, generation was quick, keeping the time between idea and printing short.
Splat keeps onboarding in check. When you first create it, the app will ask you to choose an icon and choose categories that your child likes. You can create a page for free, then it costs $4.99 per week for up to 25 pages or $49.99 per year for up to 500 pages. Settings and purchases are behind a birth gate designed to prevent children from slipping through. If you’re concerned that your child is creative enough to bypass these security gates, check out the best parental control apps now.
It’s part of a kid-friendly AI wave
Splat fits into a growing category of tools that use AI to inspire low-stakes physical creativity. The goal is something that ends up off-screen as paper that your child can color, cut out, or turn into a craft project. However, if you prefer to keep it eco-friendly, the best tablets are for you.
The same direction can be seen in other AI products for children. Miko 3 packs an AI companion into a friendly robot. Curios Springer brings conversational AI to a plush toy. Poe, the AI story bear, is dedicated to storytelling, turning prompts into personalized stories. Different formats, a similar use of AI as an impetus to play.
What to watch next
Splat competes with free printables that are just a click away, even if the click path is chaotic, and subscriptions raise the bar for parents who only print occasionally.
Splat is available for iOS and Android. If you’re curious, the practical step is to use the free generation with a photo your child already loves, and then decide whether the weekly cap or annual cap corresponds to the frequency with which you actually create new pages.
